Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus, Secunda Pars Artis Logicae

FIRST SPECIES.

The first species is habit and disposition. Several meanings of HABIT are commonly distinguished, but all are reduced to two heads: “habit” or “to have” is spoken of predicatively and postpredicatively. Postpredicatively it is the same as a mode of possession, and Aristotle counts eight modes in the final chapter.¹ Predicatively, in one sense, it signifies the last predicament, namely being clothed and putting on clothing. In another sense, it signifies a certain species of quality, according to which someone is well or badly disposed.

Likewise, DISPOSITION can be taken generally: in this sense it is the ordering of something having parts, as the Philosopher says in Metaphysics V, text 24.² It can thus also be found in quantity and in position. Second, it is taken specifically for being well or badly disposed; for from the manner in which parts are possessed, it commonly happens that something is well or badly disposed. There is, however, this difference between habit and disposition: something is called a habit when it is held and possessed firmly; otherwise, strictly speaking, we do not have it. A disposition, since by its kind it is a tendency toward the form to which it disposes and orders something, does not yet possess the form firmly and perfectly. Hence habit is called a quality difficult to move, and disposition one easy to move.

Two DIFFICULTIES arise here. The first concerns the generic account: is this first species an operative quality? The second concerns the differential accounts: do habit and disposition differ essentially?

On the first point, many think that habit consists in being an operative principle that is added rather than innate; in this they distinguish it from the second species, which is an innate principle of operation.

Nevertheless, St. Thomas teaches the opposite in I–II, q. 49, a. 2. The REASON may be given generally: some qualities of this species are not operative, such as health and beauty, which the Philosopher expressly places in the first species in Physics VII, text 17,³ as cited by St. Thomas in I–II, q. 50, a. 1; likewise grace among supernatural things. It is proved specifically that even habit, when operative, is not primarily and of itself a principle of operation, but of disposing nature well or badly; yet because nature is an operative power, it ought to be well disposed in operating. The reason is that, as the Philosopher says in the cited place, habits of both soul and body are dispositions of what is perfected toward the best. “Perfected” means disposed according to nature. Since nature and form are ends for whose sake something is done, the first species therefore considers good and bad: good is understood according to the account of an end. Thus, through habit and disposition something is said to be held well or badly—that is, suitably in relation to form and end. Hence habit and disposition can have an operative character, because the end of nature is operation or its product, or because the nature disposed by habit is an active power suitably ordered to its operation. Habit is therefore said to be given not simply for acting, but for acting in a certain way, suitably or unsuitably: although it influences the substance of the act, it does so not as the first principle of operation, which is a power, but as presupposing the power and disposing it suitably.

On the second point, Scotus (q. 9 of this predicament) and many others think habit and disposition differ only accidentally; St. Thomas, q. 7 of De malo, a. 2, ad 4, favors this opinion.⁴ The BASIS is that the very same numerically identical entity is called a habit when held firmly in a subject, and a disposition when it is not held firmly. Thus the Philosopher teaches concerning knowledge in this chapter On Quality⁵ that when it is retained in a subject only briefly, it is not a habit but a disposition; when it becomes more lasting, it is a habit.

This is confirmed because “easy” and “difficult to move from a subject” are differences also found in other genera and differences, as with passion and passible quality, or slow and swift motion, which are said to persist long or pass quickly. Therefore they cannot be essential differences of this first species; an essential difference is not found outside its own essence.

Nevertheless, St. Thomas himself and the Thomists generally hold the opposite, in I–II, q. 49, a. 2, ad 3, where he says: “Disposition can be understood as divided against habit in two ways. In one way, as the perfect and imperfect within the same species: disposition retains the common name when it is present imperfectly, while habit is so called when it is present perfectly, so that it is not easily lost; in this way disposition becomes habit, as a boy becomes a man. In another way, they can be distinguished as different subordinate species of one genus: those qualities of the first species are called dispositions which, by their proper account, are easily lost because they have changeable causes. Such are sickness and health. Habits, however, are those qualities which by their account are not easily changed, because they have unchangeable causes, as knowledge and virtues. On this account disposition does not become habit, and this seems more consonant with Aristotle’s intention.” So St. Thomas, who teaches the same in the De malo question cited above,⁶ although he also admits the contrary opinion, without settling the matter here as he does in this passage.

From this it follows what it is for something by its nature to be easy or difficult to move—a point the authors of the opposing view investigate and press so anxiously. We say that being difficult to move by nature means having, from one’s own and intrinsic principles, causes that are not easily changed. Cajetan, explaining this in the chapter On Quality, said that sometimes a quality by its species requires causes of difficult change; sometimes it is difficult to change because of an individual condition, since this subject has some disposition or cause of persistence, although the nature of the quality itself does not require it. Thus “easy to move” and “difficult to move” do not mean the same as lasting a long or short time, for duration is accidental. A disposition can last a long time and a habit a short time: since duration is continuation in being and depends on extrinsic preserving causes, something that by itself does not require unchangeable and persistent causes may often find in a particular subject a cause or disposition that preserves it for a long time. Examples are light in air, if the luminous body remains for a long time; an act of seeing, if the will remains engaged in seeing; and an ordinary illness, if someone takes no medicine but eats food contrary to health. Therefore the account of habit does not consist in being difficult to remove, nor does disposition consist in actually changing easily; rather, a disposition is easy to move, by reference to its intrinsic causes, not because some extrinsic factor accidentally makes it last or not last in actuality. Thus knowledge is intrinsically a habit, because it proceeds from evident and firm causes; and so are virtues, because they proceed from practical principles known and directed by synderesis. Opinion and vice, by contrast, have causes of easy change by their very nature: the former is against reason, the latter accompanied by fear of reason.

I know that some seek other accounts of this essential distinction: for example, that what is easy to move depends on its agent in coming to be and in being preserved, while what is difficult to move does not depend on it for preservation; or that habit lacks a contrary whereas disposition has one. These accounts are empty. We see many dispositions last even when their agent is absent, yet differ specifically from habit—for example, sickness, vice, and opinion, which persist in the agent’s absence. Conversely, infused virtues such as grace and charity depend on their proper agent for coming to be and being preserved, as light depends on the sun, as St. Thomas teaches in II–II, q. 24, a. 12, and yet they are habits. Likewise, some habits have a contrary: knowledge has error, virtue has vice, and so on.

BUT YOU WILL OBJECT: According to St. Thomas’s view, it follows that an act of demonstration is a habit, since it is generated from immutable principles, namely principles evident and certain in themselves. It also follows that there is no habit of opinion or vice; nor will impressed species be habits, contrary to St. Thomas, I–II, q. 50, a. 6, since none of these have immutable causes.

We reply that an act of demonstration, or any other act, does not have immutable causes, because an actual operation consists in its very proceeding, not in some thing produced. Operation is changeable of itself, because it is in process and coming to be, not a completed product, even if it concerns some immutable object. A habit, by contrast, is not exercise or operation, but a produced form that leaves the power immutably determined. As for opinion and vice, we judge it more probable that they are not habits, because by their nature they do not have firm adherence, but are accompanied by fear, although through repeated acts they can acquire firmness with respect to accidental manner and state. St. Thomas sometimes teaches that an opinionative habit is generated from repeated acts, as in I–II, q. 51, a. 3, and q. 53, a. 1. But he speaks of habit with respect to manner, not essence: since opinion, by the force of its species, lacks immutable principles, it may be individually fixed in some subject through an extrinsic cause, but is not simply a habit. The same must be said of vice insofar as it has a morality contrary to reason and thus lacks firm principles, although it can become fixed in the sensitive appetite on the side of sensible good, and so be firm in a qualified sense. Hence it is one thing for opinion to have the manner of a habit—that is, duration—and knowledge not to; it is another for it to have the nature of a habit, that is, firmness by its intrinsic nature and principles.

AS TO THE FIRST ARGUMENT, we deny that one and the same entity can by its nature and intrinsic principles be both habit and disposition; it can be so only with respect to state. The Philosopher commonly gave examples in terms of firmness or ease on the part of state because that is more familiar, thereby leading us from it to the less evident point, which concerns the force of nature. Thus St. Thomas, I–II, q. 50, a. 1, ad 2, says that the Philosopher called health a habit “as a habit,” as the Greek has it. In the same way he did not call sciences that are imperfectly possessed habits with respect to state, though he does not deny that they are habits by nature, as Cajetan also resolves in his commentary on this chapter On Quality.

To the confirmation we reply that “easy to move” and “difficult to move” are found primarily in motion itself, as St. Thomas says in I–II, q. 49, a. 2, ad 3. We use them, however, to describe the proper differences of quality by applying the names of motion, not motion itself. Easy and difficult to move are likewise found in other species of quality with respect to duration or ease, but not with respect to the intrinsic account of disposing a subject well or badly, which is essential to the first species.

SECOND SPECIES.

It is called power and impotence. By “power” we understand the proximate principle of operation by which a subject is constituted not for operating well or badly, but simply for truly performing the substance of the operation. The question how substance cannot operate by itself but needs a superadded quality as an eliciting principle in order to proceed to act belongs to the books On the Soul and to Metaphysics; one may consult St. Thomas, I, qq. 54 and 77. “Power” includes both active and passive power. The immanent operative powers—that is, powers receptive of what they elicit—show us that passive power exists in the genus of quality. Whether there is some quality, especially in the natural order, that is purely passive and in no way active is not for this place to discuss, but for Metaphysics V. Nor does it belong here to discuss a neutral power to act, so called because it lacks an inclination to act and is purely indifferent—not because it is neither active nor passive, as Scotus held, against whom Cajetan argues in Opuscula, vol. 3, tract 3, q. 1.

By “impotence” we do not mean a pure absence of power, but a weak and imperfect power, such as dullness of intellect, a weak power of generation, and the like. It is therefore clear that power and impotence, taken in this way, do not differ specifically simply by virtue of power and impotence as such: the same imperfect and weak power becomes perfect when its weakness is removed. There is no place here to distinguish, as with habit, immutability and firmness arising either from accidental state or from the inward and intrinsic principles of nature. For every power is like a proper attribute, arising and innate from the principles of nature; if it is a natural power, every power has intrinsic firmness. And since it is not acquired gradually, as a habit is, it does not have imperfect firmness on account of its state or imperfect acquisition—although it can be impeded and weakened by something extrinsic, in which case it is an impotence differing from power only extrinsically. It is true that a less perfect nature gives rise to a less perfect power, which in comparison with the power of another nature may seem an impotence. Strictly speaking, however, this is not an impotence, since it has the strength or capacity due to it within its own kind, although that is less than the power of another kind. An ant’s ability is less than a lion’s, for example, but what the ant has is not simply called impotence, since it is a power in its own kind; otherwise only supreme power would count as power.

From this it is clear how the first species of quality differs from the second. The first is not simply a principle of operation, but of suitably disposing nature, whether or not it is active; power, however, is simply a principle of acting or being acted upon. We have already said above how infused virtues are not powers but habits, and how character is reduced to power. This is not a matter for logic but for theology. As for why the Philosopher, when listing the species of quality in Metaphysics V⁷, omitted power, St. Thomas answers there, lect. 16,⁸ that he had treated power at greater length just before and explained it.

THIRD SPECIES.

It is passion and passible quality. Setting aside the various meanings of passion that the Philosopher lists in Metaphysics V, text 26,⁹ and that St. Thomas discusses there, lect. 20,¹⁰ passion here means a quality according to which alteration takes place. Although passion can be taken commonly for every reception of a form from some agent, and thus is the predicament of being acted upon, it is taken specifically for a passion involving some alteration and change. For we commonly say that something suffers when it is altered and removed from its disposition. This is why acts of the sensitive appetite are specifically called passions: they occur with some bodily change, as St. Thomas teaches in I–II, q. 22, a. 2. A property of a thing is also called a “proper passion” because the subject receives it as its own.

TWO THINGS, THEN, MUST BE EXPLAINED: First, what these species properly consist in; second, how passion and passible quality differ from one another.

Some say that this third species is a quality ordered to perfecting and adorning the subject, one that is neither power, habit, nor figure. But they do not explain what this quality is, only what it is not. Others say it consists in being a quality caused by alteration or causing alteration. St. Thomas supports this in Opusculum 48, On Quality, ch. 4,¹¹ in Metaphysics V, lect. 16,¹² and in I–II, q. 50, a. 1, ad 3. Others take this quality not in relation to alteration but insofar as it causes passion in sense, and so include only sensible qualities, by which the senses are naturally affected. This is the view in Scotus’s school. St. Thomas also supports it in III, q. 63, a. 2, ad 2, where he teaches that the qualities in this species are only sensible passions or sensible qualities. Finally, others, such as Cajetan in his commentary on this chapter On Quality, take passion and passible quality here to mean what is naturally apt to cause or be caused by a passion of the appetite. Insofar as it objectively arouses or incites these passions, it is called passion or passible quality. Some recent authors follow this view while omitting Cajetan’s name.

All these explanations are probable and do not differ greatly. Since acts of the sensitive appetite have two aspects—an immanent act, which is the more formal, and a bodily change, which is material—and receive the name “passion” from the latter, as St. Thomas teaches in the cited question 22 of I–II, qualities cannot be called passible solely by reference to the immanent act, but by reference to the alteration and bodily change that accompany that act of appetite. Hence this quality will be called passible primarily and more originally by reference to alteration, just as acts of appetite are called passions because an accompanying alteration is involved. The account of this third species, then, is better explained from St. Thomas, Metaphysics V, lect. 16¹³ and the cited Opusculum 48,¹⁴ as the quality of a subject insofar as it is moved and altered. Since all bodily alterations are perceptible by sense—at least by taste and touch, and some also only by sight, as illumination and coloration—it follows that only sensible qualities are said to be placed in this species, as St. Thomas said in the cited passage of III. Since alteration in quality precedes passion in sense, as its object, and once the passion of alteration is posited we can sufficiently understand what makes a quality passible or a passion, this quality’s account is derived primarily from alteration, namely from causing or being caused by it; from this it follows that it causes passion in sense.

As for the distinction between passion itself and passible quality, the common opinion is that they differ only accidentally, with respect to extrinsic causes of duration. For the redness caused by shame, which soon passes, and that caused by a good temperament, which lasts a long time, are specifically of the same account. But because passion passes quickly, Aristotle said that we are not denominated qualified by it: what passes does not give rise to a denomination simply, which requires a stable state.

FOURTH SPECIES.

It is called form and figure. FORM is taken in three ways: first, for substantial form, which simply gives being; second, for any informing act; third, for that suitable disposition of quantity by which some are said to be well-formed or beautiful.

FIGURE is taken in two ways: in one sense, for a sign, as in 1 Corinthians 10: “All these things happened to them in figure.” In a second sense, for the mode resulting from the termination of quantity. This may be intrinsic, as the figure of a hand in itself, and so is a quality; or extrinsic and positional, as the same hand, when folded or extended, presents a different positional figure. This second kind can vary while the first remains unchanged, or can even be removed altogether, as in the body of Christ in the Eucharist.

Here figure is taken in the second sense and form in the third. According to the common opinion, they differ only accidentally. Figure means the termination of quantity, or its mode, taken precisely and, as it were, mathematically. Form adds that this termination has due proportion, as a kind of beauty. Thus form is not abstracted from sensible qualities but is modified by them; figure formed, or made with proportion, is called form. It is properly found in artifacts: for example, the figure of a house or tower is called its form. On this, see St. Thomas, Physics VII, lect. 5.¹⁵

ORDERING OF THE PREDICAMENT OF QUALITY.

The most general genus is quality. It is divided immediately into four genera: habit and disposition, power and impotence, passion and passible quality, form and figure. Each of these genera is divided into various species, which we cannot pursue within each genus.

One point alone should be observed: ONLY IN THE LAST TWO GENERA are bodily qualities placed, because the third species is caused by alteration or causes it primarily and of itself. Form and figure, however, result from the termination of quantity.

IN THE FIRST TWO GENERA, HOWEVER, both bodily and spiritual qualities can be found. Habit, then, can be divided into operative and non-operative. The non-operative is divided into bodily, such as beauty and health, and spiritual, such as grace. The operative is likewise divided into sensible and spiritual. Sensible habits include the various habits of the sensitive appetite, such as temperance, fortitude, etc.; spiritual habits are intellectual or moral. Intellectual habits fall into five species: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, prudence, and art. Moral habit is divided into good and bad. Bad habit—if it truly is a habit—extends across all kinds of vice; good habit extends across all kinds of moral virtue, such as justice, religion, piety, etc. The corresponding supernatural virtues are numbered among these as well.

Power is divided into active and passive; active power into incorporeal and corporeal. Under corporeal power are vital and non-vital powers; under vital, sensory, vegetative, etc. Vegetative powers include nutrition and generation, etc. Under sensory powers are the interior and exterior senses and the sensitive appetite. Under incorporeal power are will and intellect, and, by reduction, supernatural power, namely character. Some also reduce impressed species to this genus because they complete the cognitive power. It is truer, however, that they do not give it a principle of operation, but dispose it on the side of the object; hence, when they are given permanently, they belong to habits, as St. Thomas holds in I–II, q. 50, aa. 5 and 6.